


and primeval love

by postcardmystery



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Homophobic Slurs, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 23:37:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14925110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: Five conversations Will Graham has in the house of Mason Verger. (& fifteen he has after.)Or: (sometimes internalised) homophobia, Will Graham, and true love.





	and primeval love

i.

“Perhaps you should have thought twice before opening your legs for Hannibal Lecter, if you didn’t want to end up here,” says Mason, and Will barely prevents himself from rolling his eyes.

“Have you considered that our relationship may not be sexual?” he says, and Mason laughs, a choked, mocking noise.

“I still have eyes, Mr Graham. I can see the way he looks at you. You threw your life away for him. When did he first fuck you? Before you went to prison, or after? My money’s on after, because you knew what he was then, didn’t you, which is what I think he likes best about you.”

“Our relationship isn’t like that,” says Will, simply, and Mason laughs again.

“Your relationship is about power. That’s _all_ it’s about.”

“Hannibal doesn’t think of people that way. We’re a food source. It would debase him, to sleep with me.”

“Yet he’s never eaten you. Either way, you claim.”

Will does roll his eyes, then, says, “Look at my face. That was Hannibal, about to eat me.”

“But he didn’t, did he?” says Mason, “Eat you, I mean. And here you are. In this room, with me.”

“You wanted to kill him, wearing his lover’s face,” says Will, it suddenly hitting him, his mind glossy black with realisation, and Mason half-shrugs as best he can.

“As far as I can tell, you are the only thing in the whole world that Hannibal Lecter has ever valued for its own sake. If he’s not fucking you, it’s not because _he_ doesn’t want it. You’re a puzzle, Mr Graham. Stoic in the face of murder but gripped by gay panic when I suggest Hannibal might have put his cock in you.”

Will shuts his eyes tight, says, “You want to hear a secret, Mason? Hannibal doesn’t need to fuck me. He’s killed for me, and I like that better.”

“Sexually, you mean,” says Mason, and Will can see the taunting flickering in his eyes. 

“Yes,” says Will, quietly, and even to his ears, it sounds like admitting something. Like a confession.

“Oh, my. And people say _I’m_ the freak. You know what else I like about you, Mr Graham? You’re much less— clinical. Than your lover. A surgeon’s hands. You needed to tear at my man’s face with your teeth, but you would have chosen to, given the choice, wouldn’t you?”

Mason is gloating, because that’s what Mason does, but it doesn’t make him wrong.

“Having my face won’t help you, you know.”

“Having your face will help me immensely.”

Will shakes his head, and smiles, small and threatening, says, “No, Mason, it won’t. I’ve killed Hannibal before, and he’s not died. You won’t do any better.”

“I already am,” says Mason, and Will smiles wider.

“He’ll kill you for this. For saying you’ll do this to me. _For me._ That’s a promise, Mason.”

“You’re in no position to make promises,” says Mason, but that’s what Mason thinks, and Mason Verger, as far as Will Graham is concerned, can think whatever he fucking likes. 

 

 

6.

“You told me, once, that you had forgiven me, but it was a lie,” says Hannibal, driving them to confront the Great Red Dragon, and Will looks over at him because he can’t not, feels the pull in his chest like the drag of a magnet.

“It was petty, and I don’t want to be petty anymore,” says Will, and Hannibal makes the sound that for anyone else would be a laugh.

“But you don’t forgive me?” says Hannibal, and the question seems as important as the long and winding road they’re following, as Hannibal’s long-fingered hands on the steering wheel, as the air Will’s breathing and the blood in his veins and the gun hidden at his back, and Will knows then that this answer will be the most important thing he’s ever said in his life.

“We’re beyond forgiveness. We’re into something else, now.”

“What does ‘something else’ look like?” asks Hannibal, and it thrills Will down to his very bones that he knows he’s the only person Hannibal’s ever met who can recognise that he is apprehensive of Will’s answer. That Hannibal Lecter, the defining serial killer of his age, is scared of rejection, _his_ rejection.

“Can’t live with you, can’t live without you. Bedelia told me that, you know. I’ve decided to discard the latter and try the first one on for size.”

“Then I am the luckiest man alive,” says Hannibal, and puts his foot down and drives them into the dark, and it only occurs to Will later — a whole new life later, after he’s reborn from seawater and the fall and the blackness, that he’s essentially proposed. 

 

 

3\. 

“I don’t think we have anything to say to each other,” says Will, and Bedelia smiles that fucking smile, and shakes her head.

Will is not ignorant of what their positions, facing each other in chairs in Bedelia’s charming office, are reminiscent of, he would just rather not explore it with this viper of a woman. There’s so much poison under Bedelia du Maurier’s skin he’s not sure even Hannibal himself could get it out.

“I think, in many ways, we are the only people in the world to have experiences that remotely parallel each other. Even if I was turned into a footnote in the Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham romance.”

“It was a very lucrative footnote,” says Will, and Bedelia’s smile tightens eerily.

“But you don’t deny it was a romance? Or is? I was unaware that you were even privately admitting the depth of your feelings for Hannibal, or of the depth of his for you.”

“Hannibal wanted to eat me,” says Will, succinctly.

“Hannibal talked about you constantly. He would have abandoned me in a second for you. Our ‘marriage’ was a useful fiction, but it rankled him from time to time that it was me, and not you. I could tell. I was adapted and bent into a plan made to fit another player.”

“This is ludicrous as Freddie Lounds and her ‘murder husbands’ bullshit,” says Will, and Bedelia looks at him pityingly.

“You forget, Mr Graham. I am the only person other than you who has spent real time with Hannibal, knowing what he is. Denial is as useless in this room as morality. Did you really think Florence was a coincidence?”

“Hannibal wanted to sit in front of that fucking painting,” says Will, and Bedelia’s expression is pitying again.

“Hannibal wanted to sit in front of that painting _with you_ ,” she says, like she’s dropping a bomb, and Will knew that already, of course he did, but he didn’t think _anybody else_ had noticed. 

 

 

11.

“You need to leave me,” says Will, and blood is gushing from between his fingers in rivulets. A bullet wound to the stomach is a serious problem, the sort of problem that Hannibal is in no position to fix, and he’s never felt this much anger in his life. 

“They will have to kill me to achieve that,” says Hannibal, but he’s crying. It’s been years since he cried, cried like he can’t stop, not since Will’s blood was all over his hands in a kitchen he can never go back to. Not since before they ran.

(Not since the seconds before they fell from a cliff and he knew, always and forever, that his maybe-unrequited love would never be unrequited again.)

“If you leave me, they can get me fucking emergency surgery and you can kill your way through them to get me back, Hannibal, start thinking with your head! You can’t move me like this, and we don’t have time for you to fix me. If one of us gets away then we both can later, so just do it like we planned. I left a trail of blood here like we’re Hansel and fucking Gretel. They’ll be here in minutes.”

There’s so much blood on the motel room floor that it looks like a different kind of crime scene. Will’s skin is pale and getting paler, turning his dark hair and dark eyes a different sort of gothic, and it’s so wrong that Hannibal’s mind keeps searching for other options, for anything _not this_. 

“If I leave you—”

“ _When_ ,” says Will, and then he’s kissing him, barely more than biting him, clutching at his back and holding on. He tastes like metal. His blood is all over the floor. His skin is deathly pale. Hannibal has never been more in love. 

“I love you,” says Hannibal, hopelessly, and Will shoves him away.

“Go on, fuck off, get running. I’ll see you later.”

“I will get you back,” says Hannibal, and Will tips his head back and smiles. 

“I know, or I wouldn’t let you go,” he says, and grips again at Hannibal’s hand, and it’s so intensely Will, that eternal push-and-pull, that Hannibal can’t help but smile.

“Write to me,” Will orders, and it’s only after Hannibal has climbed out of the bathroom window that he hears Will screaming and screaming and screaming, eternally his cleverest boy, drawing attention as a flame to thirty FBI moths, and Will is going to live. 

He says that to himself like a mantra, and pulls his phone out of his pocket. 

Will is going to live. His finger hovers over the name _Alana_. Time to play his ace in the hole. 

 

 

ii.

Alana comes back to see him, hours later. Will isn’t sure why. Boredom, possibly. He’s fairly sure by now it isn’t guilt.

“Mason says you were sleeping with him. Are sleeping with him, I suppose,” says Alana, and Will snorts.

“Mason says you’re sleeping with his sister. Mason says a lot of things.”

Alana taps her cane on the floor and sits heavily down at the dining table. She couldn’t have known that she picked what was once Hannibal’s seat, a scarce few hours ago, but it makes Will’s chest ache anyway.

“I am sleeping with his sister. Though Mason doesn’t know that at all. I’m perfectly aware that was you, scrabbling around inside our heads, Will. I know you, or something like it.”

Alana is— not different, exactly. Remote. Imperious. Brilliant, and not afraid to show it anymore. A bright sharp intellect encased in a perfect suit with a bright sharp mouth to match. Steel within the leather glove. Diamond-hard under silk. Another name is on the tip of his tongue like fine wine.

(Maybe, just maybe, Will does have a type. 

Did. 

For who else has he thought about but _him_ in years?)

“You’ve changed,” lies Will, because he knows it will make her beautiful face twist, and it does. 

But the fact remains: she hasn’t changed, but Become. Snapped her spine and bloomed anew, another sort of _good doctor_ with a bear trap for a mind.

“I remind me of you, actually. This is what survival looks like. Stepping willingly into the house of Mason Verger.”

“No,” says Will, simply, “You remind me of him.”

He doesn’t have to clarify which _him_. They both know it isn’t the Verger heir. 

“That’s not the compliment you think it is.”

“Who said I think it’s a compliment?” says Will, but Alana is smiling.

“I said I knew you, Will, and I do. You know, I almost hope you are sleeping with him, it would make your relationship a little less bizarre. At least I picked the good Verger, for God’s sake.”

“He’s going to kill all of you if you let Mason cut my face off,” says Will, and Alana smiles again.

“Yes, I know. We’re banking on that. Almost.”

“Hannibal doesn’t do things by halves,” says Will, and finally saying his name feels like a physical release in and of itself.

Alana snorts knowingly, says, “You’ll die or you won’t, Will. Which horse would you back, here? Honestly. Men. They always think only they can have goddamn _plans_.”

 

 

5\. 

“I’ve made a decision,” says Will, and listens to Chiyoh’s breathing.

“If you kill him, I will kill you,” she says, and Will shushes her.

He’s locked in a gas station bathroom, and the time is ticking down before Jack comes to look for him. There’s minutes left for this to work.

“I want to do the opposite. I know you’re in the tri-state area. You know all of Hannibal’s holdings. I need a boat, at the one with the cliff.”

Chiyoh makes a doubtful noise, and says, “I’m confirming nothing over an insecure line, Will Graham.”

(And why is it that only Lecters can say his name in such a lavishly mocking tone?)

“Chiyoh. _Please_. I’m asking for your help. If you don’t do this, we’re both going to die.”

“If you kill him, I will kill you,” she repeats, and hangs up the phone. 

 

 

iii.

“You should’ve asked me to kill your brother,” says Will, and Margot rolls her eyes.

He doesn’t quite understand why Margot and Alana come to him alone, but he suspects it is to prevent him from divulging more clues to their plan from their dynamics as a couple— which is smart, if frustrating. He still doesn’t quite believe them that he’s going to escape mutilation, but Mason has underestimated Hannibal before, and seems likely arrogant enough to do so again. Psychopaths: with a couple exceptions, they can be extremely predictable within some very specific parameters. 

“You killing my brother would only have been useful if you’d fucked him first,” she says, and Will is so startled by her frankness that he laughs.

“You should’ve just said. The first thing Mason ever did was come on to me.”

Margot twitches; Will thinks she’s repressing laughter.

“You’re not his usual type.”

“He saw something wounded in me. That’s definitely his usual type, give or take. I could’ve given him what he wanted and then taken what I wanted. I learnt something useful while abroad: violence is not the only form of influence available to me.”

“Hmmm. I can see why you would say that. Alana said that Hannibal is— obsessed with you.”

Will doesn’t follow the switch in conversational track until he does, and sighs.

“I don’t mean only sex, Margot. Hannibal doesn’t want to have sex with me, he wants to commit murder with me. It’s pretty different.”

“You’re right that Hannibal doesn’t _only_ want to have sex with you, I guess. Thank you for offering to fuck Mason, but it’s perfectly fine, we have a plan. I’m not sure Hannibal could carry it out if you seduce my brother, and I don’t want to see him lose control.”

“I’m not offering to seduce him now,” says Will, and Margot smiles.

(It’s a lift of one corner of her mouth, sharp and knowing and all-too-familiar. She’s a different sort of mirror to Hannibal, but a mirror all the same.)

“No. I suppose you wouldn’t feel able to, now,” she says, and Will closes his eyes and breathes and breathes and breathes, because fuck this house, fuck the Vergers, she’s _right_.

 

 

1.

It hurts, to see Hannibal Lecter in a cage. Will hadn’t been expecting that.

But he should have been, and he knows that, because he knows himself so well, now, knows exactly what he feels for Hannibal Lecter, cage or no cage. Knows that his heart cannot be trusted to overrule his head, but that his head also cannot be trusted to not make— plans. Plots. _Decisions_.

Something in Will’s chest is twisting painfully, and he’s powerless to make it stop. He’s too much experience already with that around Hannibal fucking Lecter. 

“Alana listens to all my conversations,” says Hannibal, and his cruel mouth is curving just like Will remembers. Only aristocrats have mouths like that.

“I should hope so,” says Will, and Hannibal’s mouth curves again.

“Do you recall the night that we drank brandy, and I read to you from Goethe? You slept in my bed, and I visited a patient that was put on an emergency hold. I think of that night often.”

 _I bet you do_ , thinks Will, because between the lines of Hannibal’s words is everything he doesn’t want Alana to hear: a confession, late in the night, of things he couldn’t quite describe or name. Hannibal heard what he meant, beneath, the skin under the skin, the veil so gossamer thin than Will couldn’t help the things tumbling out of his mouth.

(“Does it surprise you, to discover these desires, so late in life?” Hannibal had asked, and Will had tried to shrug, his skin crawling with the nakedness of admitting something he had hoped would go away if he buried it, locked it down tight. No one was more aware than him that if anyone should have known better. He’d already got enough desires he shouldn’t have, locked down equally tight. 

“It— the target of them concerns me,” Will had said, and he’d seen Hannibal spin deceitful webs, slip his hands into open wounds, and stand in front of the bars of Will’s own cage, revelling, but he’d never before seen Hannibal look so fucking _smug_.

“And how does that make you feel?” Hannibal had said, smirking at the rote ritual, and Will had wanted to kill him then, he really had.

Except.)

“No,” says Will, for the hell of it, and Hannibal’s mouth twitches.

“If you insist,” Hannibal demurs, his head moving in its predator tilt, and his eyes flicker up to the security cameras.

“You’re supposed to be helping me with the Tooth Fairy,” says Will, and goes across the room, just to watch Hannibal mirror his movements like a shark. Hannibal is watching him with devoted, single-minded patience, and though Will had truthfully never forgotten what this felt like, being in the midst of it again feels overwhelming. If Hannibal repeated back every thought inside his head, he would ask for more. He would ask for _critique_.

Close to the glass, he presses a single fingertip, and Hannibal’s pupils dilate in what feels like slow motion— in what feels like a lot of things. Will needs to get out of this fucking room. He needs—

“I told you that Marlowe’s Faust is better,” whispers Will, low enough that the camera can’t catch him, and walks away.

 

 

4\. 

“Are you Achilles or Patroclus?” says Will, and Hannibal’s eyebrow arches.

Hannibal’s hair has been shorn short again, and he looks thinner. Prison agrees with no one but it especially does not agree with him. Speaking of especiallys, Will especially hates the glass today. This morning it’s nothing but a barrier and a tease, and he wants to be skin close to Hannibal, to feel his heart beat so he can try and judge truth from fiction. He needs it so much he feels sick with it, and it’s not a pleasant or comfortable feeling. 

“You are, aware, of course, that the answer to that has several connotations, some of them sexual?”

“You’re the one that made the comparison,” says Will.

“Years ago, and in the context of your deceit of me,” says Hannibal, and it’s the first time Will has ever heard him sound bitter.

“I assumed that I was Patroclus, but he was older, wasn’t he? Achilles was godborn and godtouched, and in that you found echoes of me. The Achilles heel of my empathy.” 

“The weapon I made you hone,” says Hannibal, his nostrils flaring, barely perceptible, but there.

“Achilles wished that all the Greeks would die, so he and Patroclus could conquer Troy alone,” says Will, and Hannibal presses his hand against the glass.

“My wishes are clear, and will never be retracted. Your wishing—”

“I’ve told you what I want,” says Will, quickly.

“Yet here we are, once again in conversation.”

“I’m not here for the pleasure of your company,” spits Will, but it’s unconvincing even to him.

“When are you going to admit that we are destined for a conversation which will never end?” says Hannibal.

“Not yet,” Will whispers, and ignores the voice telling him that’s an admission in and of itself. 

 

 

9.

“I’ve got a surprise for you, and I’m not sure you’ll like it,” calls Will, and when Hannibal steps into the kitchen, he immediately sees why. 

There’s blood on the marble countertops, on the tiled floor, smeared on the walls and the door to the garden and across the stove top. It’s drying in Will’s hair, on his hands, crusted around his mouth. The knife he used remains lodged in the man’s throat, and what’s left of him is splayed on the floor, but judging by the gashes in his neck, the knife isn’t the first weapon Will used. 

“I had to,” says Will, and he barely sounds apologetic. There’s red on his teeth, and Hannibal feels a swell of pride and affection and _want_ so strong that it is almost his undoing. He’s still sitting on the floor, compulsively running his hands through his hair, and Hannibal grips him by the shoulders and pulls him up, presses Will’s face into the side of his neck, covetous. 

“Did he know—”

“Who we are? No. Nothing like that. We don’t have to leave. He was a blackmailer. He wanted money, or to cause trouble, and I think he’d have been as happy with the trouble as the money.”

“Blackmail? But not for revealing our true identities?”

Will draws back, makes careful eye contact.

“I don’t really want to tell you what he said. You’ll only want to kill him all over again, and I’ve deprived you of that particular pleasure.”

“Ah,” says Hannibal, as realisation dawns, and, even under all the viscera, Will’s skin flushes noticeably.

“He called me a _faggot_. Said he knew how to make trouble for people like us. He came when you were out, deliberately. He thought I was the weak one. Said the ones who _take it_ usually are.”

“More fool him. And now we can have him for our supper.”

Will grins, feral, bloodsoaked, beautiful as the gates of Hell.

“I killed him with my teeth and my bare hands, and then killed him again, just to make sure it stuck. Shows what he knows.”

“I have never loved you more than I do in this moment,” says Hannibal, honestly, and Will laughs.

“Liar,” he says, and when he kisses Hannibal, it feels like the breath of God. 

 

 

13\. 

“It’s your lawyer,” says a disinterested orderly, and pushes the phone into Will’s cell.

Will picks the phone up in the full awareness that he hasn’t had a lawyer in six months, and electricity prickles over his skin in waves. 

“Tomorrow,” says Hannibal’s voice, and then the click of the line disconnecting, but Will knows how to play this game.

“Thank you for calling, yes, I’d like you to file the paperwork for an appeal,” he says, to empty air, because Hannibal is coming back for him, and hell follows with him.

 

 

2\. 

“No one at the FBI will even look at me,” says Will, quiet in the dark of the evening, dark and getting darker in Alana’s imposing office.

“Do you want them to? That’s not like you,” says Alana, and sips from the glass in her hand. 

She drinks whisky now, her lips a red slash on the rim, and those hands that hold the glass killed Mason Verger, Will knows, as surely as he knows Hannibal didn’t. She is still distant, chilly and commanding and careful, like she wasn’t before. Change is the name of this game, but of all of them, Will thinks, Alana may be the one who won. A free billionaire with a young son, married to the love of her life. Will isn’t sure he’s even achieved one of those things. 

(Molly. He should feel guilty, but he doesn’t, and anyway, he’s not been free since the day he met Hannibal Lecter, all those years ago.)

“Ha. No, not like that. The things they say about me are— unpleasant. But differently unpleasant. About Hannibal and me. About what Jack must know about Hannibal and me, and use to make me do things.”

“Ah,” says Alana, and precisely nothing else.

“You’ve accused me of similar yourself,” says Will, and Alana smirks.

“Yes, but I think it was with rather less judgement, in its way. The only thing that explains your behaviour is that you were in love with him, you have to know that. I’m using the past tense against my better judgement, by the way.”

“I’m straight,” Will shoots back, instant, and Alana, looks, for a moment, almost kind. The ghost of a woman who isn’t there anymore. The woman who was his friend.

“So was I. Or so I thought. Or, I was aware of things. I called them my ‘theoreticals’. I wasn’t distressed by them, not the way you seem to be, but they didn’t seem to be very important. Until I met Margot, and she made them important by being the most important person in the world. Why is it unpleasant, that people think you were sleeping with Hannibal?”

“Because it’s not true,” says Will.

“How is it worse than people believing you were committing ritualistic cannibalistic murder together?”

“Because— because we both know that me committing ritualistic murder with Hannibal had an even odds chance of actually happening. I will deny ever saying that if you repeat it to anyone, Alana.”

“I think your frame of reference is a little off,” says Alana, and Will shrugs.

“I would prefer to be hated for the things that fester inside of me like rot, rather than a projected image of me,” he says, and Alana sighs.

“Bisexuality is actually less terrible than being a serial killer, Will, and anyway, I’m not sure that they’re mutually exclusive. Love is actually the only justifiable reason to have ever become entangled with someone like Hannibal. Just something to mull over. Consider it my last and only piece of professional advice.”

“I’m not in love with Hannibal Lecter,” says Will, and if he says it enough times, maybe this will be the time somebody believes him.

 

 

iv.

“This is going to hurt,” Mason says, wheeled up close, hot on Will’s face.

“Promises, promises,” says Will, and it’s worth it to see the anger flicker and flash in Mason’s eyes.

“I would pray, if I were you,” says Mason, and Will keeps his mouth shut and his cards close to his chest, but he’s not— he’s not _not_ praying, exactly.

He trusts. That’s maybe it. His pact is with not God, but the devil, and the devil always comes to collect.

That, if nothing else, Will Graham can count on in this life.

(And the next. And the next. And the—)

 

 

8\. 

Their house is on the beach. 

Will is never going to get used to seeing Hannibal in such bright sunlight. He’s a thing of shadows and glass shards, the best for pricking. Will tans in minutes and Hannibal says he’s ‘an appealing copper shade’ and it somehow isn’t sleazy. This, Will suspects, is what contentment feels like.

(Recovery was slow, and unpleasant, but Chiyoh left months ago, on a mission of her creation. She’s as much a Lecter as Hannibal or Mischa, and her motives are her own, and her distaste for all men but her brother was clear as a bell this time, though she tolerated Will as best as she could, he knows. He doesn’t know if they’ll ever see her again, but whatever Hannibal owes her, it cannot count yet as repaid. 

They’d healed in Mexico, and the healing was almost unbearable in its intimacy. Will slept in a single bed next to Hannibal’s, so they couldn’t jostle each other, and saw every inch of Hannibal’s body, stripped bare of bandages, bloody and cut up and real. They couldn’t touch for even a second without it hurting, and Will wanted to so much.)

They’ve been in the house five days when Hannibal says, “We are on the FBI’s most wanted list. Apologies for the dramatic announcement, but it’s a little hard to access the Internet here, and I thought it best to make you aware.”

“Christ,” says Will, glancing over his shoulder at Hannibal’s tablet screen, “That’s a terrible photo of me. It’s the one from my FBI badge. They’re shooting themselves in the foot, no one’s going to recognise me working from that.”

“An excellent one of me, however. I truly assumed that they would deduce that we were dead.”

“I guess Molly is going to have to actually divorce me, then. I thought the cliff would free her of that. You’ve run away with a married man.”

“Have I?” 

“Have you what?”

“Run away with a married man,” says Hannibal, calmly.

“I— I shouldn’t make assumptions,” says Will, and Hannibal smirks.

“Please do.”

Will swallows, and knows if he’s lucky that this is the last time he’ll ever have to leap off a cliff without looking.

“I only had sex with Molly a handful of times. I don’t think she minded, really, she wanted a friend more than she wanted a husband. It was— difficult for me. I thought about you incessantly. The only time I ever really wanted it was since Jack called me back in, and she was miles away and we didn’t— it happened at first sight, I think. Or second. You in the ambulance, and then when I knew what you were. It ate at me. God, I’m talking so much, this isn’t what I wanted to say at all.”

“I have wanted you always, if that’s what you’re asking,” says Hannibal, and presses his thumb into Will’s temple.

“I wasn’t even sure if you had sexual impulses,” says Will, and Hannibal smiles.

“I prefer men, but I will admit that I have rarely pursued people for genuine sexual satisfaction since my youth. It seemed—”

“Beneath you,” Will finishes.

“Yes. But you are not beneath me. Can I kiss you without hurting you?”

Hannibal’s thumb has migrated to the scar that sears through Will’s face. It’s more pink than red but it’ll heal thick and pale, bright like a venomous animal’s warning colouration for poison. 

“It’ll hurt, but I want you to do it anyway, I want you to do everything you can think of,” says Will, and Hannibal does, Hannibal does it over and over again, pulling Will into his lap and then pushing Will up against their bedroom wall with his thigh between his legs, and when Will comes from kissing like a college kid and he feels the tremble in Hannibal’s shoulders from holding him up, his cock hard against Will’s hip but holding back carefully anyway, he thinks, _oh yeah, married man_ , and for the first time, it doesn’t feel like something he had to steal.

 

 

10\. 

Louisiana is sticky-hot, hot like Will’s childhoods, hot like fresh blood. It was a risk, but a risk worth taking, and Will’s mouth tastes like copper and the eau de cologne he licked from Hannibal’s skin this morning, like the roadside diner food they’ve been eating since arrival and which Hannibal barely deigned to eat and Will adored. This trip is a gift to him, and he’s grateful.

“Come away from the window,” Hannibal says, and Will flicks a glance at him, and then to the man tied to the chair in their shitty motel room. Oh, the things you can do in shitty motel rooms in Louisiana with a wallet full of cash and a local’s accent.

“It ain’t gonna help you none if someone sees me,” Will says, and Hannibal looks at him fondly. The slip into the accent he was _very_ careful to lose is a gift to Hannibal in return, and Will enjoys very precisely the way it makes Hannibal’s pupils dilate and his puns even more transparent than usual. The gift Hannibal has given him is precious and cathartic, and he intends to repay Hannibal with a very good fuck after this man is meat.

(“My boyfriend says you like killin’ fags,” Will had said, and his sneer cut across his face like a blade.

“Fuck you, cocksucker,” Louisiana’s newest and dumbest serial killer had said, and that was that.)

“It’ll help me if the fuckin’ cop who’s been tailin’ me for the past six days sees you,” the man spits out, and Will meets Hannibal’s eyes without even thinking about it.

“Wrong,” says Will, plunging the knife into the man’s neck, and as he pulls it in a red arc, the door begins to shake—

 

 

14.

“I love you,” says Will, and it’s true because it’s been true this whole time, it’s been true forever. It’s been true the way gravity is true, and quantum mechanics, and the passage of time. It’s true like the scar on his face and his stomach, true like the bullet hole scored through the middle of Hannibal and the slits on his wrists. True like Beethoven and Bizet, true like Homer and Horace. True like life, and death and death and death.

“Thank you for saying it,” says Hannibal, politely, and Will laughs.

“Thank you for thanking me for finally stopping being too chickenshit to say something you already knew.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” says Hannibal, primly, and Will laughs again.

“I do love you, though. I am in love with you. Painfully. Beyond marriage and beyond this life and beyond forever.”

“But marriage still feels truthful, in its way. A joining.”

Hannibal has a mischievous look on his face, but Will knows him well enough by now to know that he’s probably at least a little serious. 

“You’re it for me,” says Will, and it’s something so many people have said, millions, probably, but he’s aware that none of them ever meant it like this. Not even one.

“I would have killed every single FBI agent in America to get you back,” admits Hannibal, and Will takes his hand and kisses it, cups Hannibal’s face, strokes a finger down a sharp cheekbone.

“I was thinking Hong Kong, for a little while, and then a country where whoever we are by then can get married,” he says, and is it a proposal, when you don’t even have to ask?

 

 

12.

“I’m going to make you talk if it’s the last thing I do on this goddamn earth,” says Jack Crawford, and Will is no more patient in a cage than he used to be, with his taped up stomach and his cut short nails and the promise of a mask on his face always just around the corner, but he’s alive and it’s just a matter of time.

Jack alone looks unchanged, hair greying only a little. It transports Will back, to a life he doesn’t miss, except for the dogs. He feels bad for Jack, distantly, because the loss of Bella must hang on him so heavily now, but it’s outweighed by other feelings. Mostly rage, tinged with irritation. 

“My brain is for me and me alone now,” says Will, and Jack’s eyes narrow.

“The stuff they took off you was— nothing I’ve ever seen you wear before. Labels. Burberry coat, seven hundred dollar glasses, alligator boots. I’m guessing you’re not the one who picked that stuff out?”

“You guess wrong,” says Will, and Jack sighs.

“Just because we haven’t found him yet, it doesn’t mean anything. We got you and we’ll get him too.”

“What is it that you want to ask me?” says Will, and Jack crosses his arms, not at all thrown off by the change in conversational track. Not that he ever is, it’s one of his foremost gifts, but Will’s— not seen it in action for a while. It’s good, not to forget that the man chasing them is exactly as smart as he seems.

“You know what I want to ask you,” Jack snaps, and Will laughs.

“He’s the other slotted-in half of my soul. He’s dead, died in the gunfire that got me. You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do, outside of the obvious. Is any of that helpful?”

“I know he’s not dead,” says Jack, and Will cocks his head.

“You don’t know any such thing.”

“I know that if he was dead, you would be much less fucking composed.”

“Oh, you don’t want to see me when I’m less composed,” says Will, coquettish, and Jack sighs again, heavier this time.

“Yes, I’ve heard all about what Interpol thinks you did in Cuba. If you tell me where he is, I might be able to stop you from getting the death penalty in Louisiana. ‘The offense was committed in an especially heinous, atrocious or cruel manner.’ That’s all it takes for them to put a needle in your arm. There’s a ‘ritualistic acts’ clause, too. Sound familiar?”

“I don’t scare no more, Jack,” says Will, letting his accent haunt his words for effect, and Jack’s eyes go blank.

“If you won’t talk to me I’ll send someone else. You’ll drown in the noise and the people. I’ll keep sending them and sending them, asking you stupid questions, talking down to you, and I’ll break you, Will. I promise you that. You’ve got a string of diagnoses now, they’ll treat you like an idiot, and you won’t be able to take it,” warns Jack, and Will twitches out a shrug. 

“No skin off my nose,” he says, delighting in the rudeness of it, the anatomical imagery, how Jack’s face is disappointed but not surprised. 

“The cops down in New Orleans, they were all asking me if you were fucking him,” says Jack, and even though Will knows academically that this sudden swerve is a classic Jack tactic, it still throws him off guard a little. Jack is letting the silence hang, trying to burrow into whatever insecurity he thinks he’s targeting. Will is determined not to let him. 

“Other way around. You might as well quit trying to antagonise me with that line of questioning, it would’ve worked years ago if it was going to work at all,” he says, and Jack’s face doesn’t move a muscle.

“This isn’t over,” says Jack, and it’s not that he’s wrong, but.

 

 

7\. 

“I love you,” says Hannibal, in Will’s ear, intimate as the blood trickling down his face and twice as heated, and Will knows that this could never be a mistake.

Then they hit the water. 

 

 

15.

“Promise me,” says Will, and Hannibal pushes him onto his back, kisses his neck and his chest and the inside of his wrist, says, “Some clarity would be appreciated, Will.”

They’ve been in bed half the day, suffering through a heatwave that’s staggering even for Buenos Aires in the summertime. The dogs are asleep downstairs, arranged in little circles around very expensive fans. Their bedroom walls are a deep blue, chosen for their memories of the drop and the waves, the aircon on full blast so they can bear to touch. Hannibal’s hands are big and careful and he’s fucked Will twice already, Will mouthing into the sheets and pulling at Hannibal’s back to drag him further under his skin and he’s sticky all over, sweating out a fever that he knows will never end.

“If they— if they find us and there’s no escape. That we’d never see each other again. That they might go extrajudicial and shoot you in the head but not me. Promise me you’ll kill me. Promise me we die together.”

“I’ll do you if you do me,” says Hannibal, wicked and proud of himself and infuriating and beautiful, and Will pulls him into a kiss that stings his mouth before answering. 

“No, that’s why— I. I could kill myself, maybe. I can’t kill you. Can’t even think about it anymore, outside of the abstract.”

“You told me once that you had thought about killing me. That you would do it with your hands. What changed?”

Will puts his hand on Hannibal’s neck, holds him still, smirking.

“Yeah. I know you’ve thought about that. I know exactly how much you liked it. But— we changed each other. I changed. I can’t do it, I— I love you too much to do it. I need you to do it for me. This is me explicitly requesting it, when and if the time comes.”

“Suicide—”

“Is the enemy. Yes, I know. But I would rather be dead than never see you again. I deduce that you feel the same.”

Hannibal puts his hand on Will’s neck, resting, gentle. He presses down, barely exerting, and Will smiles at him, seen. _Like that_.

“You know how I feel. I have never been accused of being anything less than emotionally transparent where you are concerned.”

“That’s an understatement. Hannibal, please. I’m asking you because I need it. I _want_ it to be you. No one gets to kill me but you.”

“It would be an honour,” says Hannibal, his voice breaking, and runs his hands through Will’s hair, and Will Graham, he’s going to die at those hands, the only hands which have ever unmade him and remade him anew, the hands that pulled him from the ocean, pulled bullets out of his flesh and pulled stitches through him, also, pulled the truth out of his mouth and his soul and made him see himself as he is and nothing less, and this, he thinks, is his definition of—

—well. You know what it’s his definition of, and now everyone else does, too.

 

 

v.

Will is half-awake, slip-sliding in and out of consciousness, and it feels like there’s water in his lungs, his eyes, dripping out of his mouth.

He opens his eyes, and he’s in Hannibal’s arms, blood smeared, carried, bridal, and he finds Hannibal’s gaze like a compass being dragged true north.

“I knew you would come for me,” he says, and Hannibal smiles.

And smiles.

And smiles—

And—

Will’s heart aches in his chest, and—

It starts and stops and ends and begins, Will finds, with a fall.

**Author's Note:**

> This doesn’t show Will’s escape at all because I’m writing a sequel about Alana and Margot that covers that in more detail. It will also deal with Abigail’s death.


End file.
